Natalie Douglas
‘Back to the Garden’
Club44 Records

An excellent podcast series, “99% Invisible,” recently devoted an episode to the history of the cassette tape, and concluded that the most rewarding use of that medium was made by legions of fans of the Grateful Dead, who went around taping that band’s concerts and exchanging copies of those tapes with each other. The jazz equivalents of those Deadheads were the followers of a pioneering Afro Futurist big band leader, Sun Ra, who likewise took it upon themselves to record every show.

The contemporary artist who most deserves to be documented in such a fashion is the singer Natalie Douglas. During her album-launch show on a recent evening, Ms. Douglas announced to the crowd that this was her 82nd appearance at Birdland over 20 years — and most have been unique, individual shows. 

Ms. Douglas is a master of that presentation format known as the songbook, with special regard for the musical catalogs of such larger-than-life Black icons as Sammy Davis Jr., Nat King Cole, Stevie Wonder, and Shirley Bassey. She also focuses on women who write their own songs and thus chart the course of their own musical destiny, like Abbey Lincoln, Joni Mitchell, and Nina Simone. I was present for most of these shows, at Birdland, 54 Below, and elsewhere, and I would love to have pro-quality soundboard tapes of all of them.

Now, Ms. Douglas has a new album — only her fourth — and rather than be overwhelmed with choices as to what specific show to record, she made the logical decision of offering a potpourri of songs without any obvious connection to each other, apart from that they’re all representative of her favorite artists and biggest influences. 

It’s an ambitious album, produced by Wayne Haun and Kris Crunk, with strings, horns, and full orchestras on many tracks, yet it doesn’t sound overproduced — or, worse, overprocessed. Natalie sounds like Natalie.

“Back to the Garden” contains a bit of everything, and reflects Ms. Douglas’s major strengths, showing how diversity and consistency can work hand in hand. Her singing is equal parts pop, jazz, country, musical theater, cabaret (whatever that might mean), soul, R&B … the list goes on. You run out of genres well before she runs out of songs and ideas.  

A number like Gilbert Bécaud’s “Let It Be Me” — a 1955 French song that became a hit for a rockabilly duo, the Everly Brothers, and later was taken up by Elvis Presley — is precisely her jam.

The album opens with a tidy, concise reading of “Begin the Beguine,” rendered as a straightforward swinger; Cole Porter’s longest ear worm, the melody is so extended that it only requires one chorus to fill up an entire track. She seamlessly intermingles what we would think of as Great American Songbook Standards, like Harry Warren’s “You’ll Never Know” delivered with disarming honesty, with gems from the singer-songwriter era, like Ewan MacColl’s “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” in which she was supported at Birdland by a unique, four-handed piano accompaniment.  

Jerome Kern’s blithely innocent “Who?” takes its place in the same line-up as Oscar Brown’s bitterly tinged protest number, “Work Song” — and it’s amazing that this elegant woman in a stylish gown can make us visualize convicts “breakin’ rocks out here on the chain gang” so vividly.

Even after decades of catching Ms. Douglas at Birdland as often as possible, she offers surprises. One major discovery is “He Lives in a World of His Own,” a highly James Bond-centric song, written by a Bond-centric composer, Lionel Bart, for a Bond-centric singer, Shirley Bassey, although never officially recorded by anyone until now. 

Appropriately, the arranging team dresses it up with the electric bass notes and swirling strings of a vintage Bond theme. This is as close as Ms. Douglas comes to belting, but she’s still a much more nuanced and subtle singer than those millennial pop stars recruited to blast away on recent spy epics.

At Birdland last Monday, Ms. Douglas performed the whole album from start to finish. She’s been dropping hints, previews, and advance singles for months. 

The first two that I heard were Joni Mitchell’s “Woodstock” and the Sherman Brothers’s “Trust in Me” from “The Jungle Book.” Somehow those two songs suggested a narrative unto itself: One is about a snake seducing us to give in to temptation; Ms. Douglas makes it seem like a hipper precedent to Andrew Lloyd Webber’s “Music of the Night.” The other, which gave us the album’s title, is about the search for innocence, the notion of a new beginning for mankind by using the epic 1969 rock music festival as a return to a biblical Eden. 

Possibly here is yet another theme that Ms. Douglas could explore in a future show.

The studio album has charm galore, particularly in the orchestrations and arrangements by Mr. Haun and Joel Mott, but to get the full flavor of Ms. Douglas’s presence you need to catch the live shows — the wide-eyed greeting, “Hi kids,” her understated sense of humor, topped off with a Valley Girl-ish squeal of a laugh, her shtick revolving around the cabaret tradition of the not-very-spontaneous encore. Even her pitch for the crowd to buy her CDs is adorable: “Think of it as reparations.”